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Chapter One

Diego Bermúdez probably heard about Columbus's voyage from the booming voice of Martin Alonso Pinzón, leader of the best-known sailing family in the Spanish town of Palos de la Frontera. A crowd gathered around Pinzón as he stood in the dusty town square one afternoon, trying to make himself heard. According to a sailor, this is what Pinzón shouted:

    make this journey, for with the help of God we will discover land, for according to rumor we will find houses roofed with gold and everyone will become rich and fortunate."

    Colón, known to us as Christopher Columbus. Townspeople listened, though many thought the idea was crazy. Columbus proposed to sail west all the way across the Ocean Sea to Cipango (Japan), Cathay (China), and the Spice Islands, now part of Indonesia. It had never been done before. Columbus was confident the journey would take only about a month. They'd all be back in less than a year, he said.

    sailed with Columbus were homeless orphans who begged for or stole what food they could. Some found work on the boats, scrubbing the decks or repairing ropes. Most couldn't read or write, since there was no public school in Palos. They liked to gather around the docks, listening to sailors tell stories of giant fish, gold, waterspouts, and battles at sea.

    be gromets, or apprentice seamen. They would scramble up the ropes high above the deck to rig and change the sails. They would also repair ropes and row the ships' officers to and from the shore. In storms and heavy seas they'd cling one-armed to the masts, lashing the sails to their wooden frames while the wind tore at their fingers. They had to learn dozens of knots and hitches. Each gromet carried a knife at all times and wore a belt with a supply of rope sections around his waist. Captains hired teenagers partly because they showed little fear and partly because, unlike many of the old sailors, most boys still had both arms and legs.

    of the ships' officers. Columbus's devoted criado was sixteen-year-old Pedro de Salcedo. Columbus grew to like him so much that years later he arranged for Pedro to get profits from the sale of all soap in much of the New World.

    members. Pages kept track of everyone's watch duty and did work that no one else wanted to do, like cooking one hot meal per day, washing fire-blackened pots, and scrubbing the decks.

    had very mixed feelings about the chance to go on such an adventure. On the one hand, there was the possibility of discovering gold and winning fame. Even if that didn't happen, Columbus had raised enough money to offer every sailor four months' advance pay. This was a fortune to most families of Palos. On the other hand, Diego might well have been worried. Maps of the time showed that huge, dragonlike monsters lurked in the Ocean Sea. Were they really out there? Even if the sailors made it to the Indies, how could they ever get back home against the stiff wind that blew west from the coast of Spain? And how could Columbus and Pinzón really know that you could reach the Indies by sailing west?

    the morning of August 3, 1492, the whole town gathered to send off the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Some boys got married just before they sailed, promising their brides that they would return as wealthy husbands.

    then, on September 6, they cast off into the unknown for the West and Cipango. When land disappeared from sight three days later, some sailors burst into tears.

    tennis court. The Santa María was a little bigger than the other two ships. The Niña and the Pinta each carried about twenty-five men and boys, the Santa María about forty. The crews had to quickly learn to work as a team on the rocking, slippery decks.

    every day—a loose-fitting poncho pulled over a shirt, trousers tied with a drawstring, and a red woolen cap jammed onto his head. He bathed by dumping a bucket of seawater over his body. The toilet was a seat called the "garden" that dangled out over the edge of the ship. He slept in his soggy clothes on a thin mattress below deck, where you couldn't stand up without bumping your head. The crew ate small loaves of twice-baked bread called hardtack along with pea stews and salted meat or fish. Even the youngest boys washed their food down with strong white wine.

    Columbus—had to stand watch for four hours once a day to look out for weather changes or enemy ships. Sailors couldn't wait to get off watch. Every half hour the crew relied on the sound of a page's voice to tell them how much of their shift remained.

    half hour's supply of sand. When all the sand ran to the bottom, the page on duty turned the glass over and sprinted up to the poop deck—a little landing above the main deck. There he rang a bell, filled his lungs with air, and sang out a prayer loudly enough for everyone to hear. Pages had to memorize sixteen different prayers in all, each for a particular time of day.

    it up and make the sand run faster. That led to the utterance of Columbus's favorite oath, "By San Fernando!" and sometimes a thrashing. Pages also helped measure how fast their ships were going by throwing a piece of wood out onto the water and counting how many seconds it took the object to pass between two marks on the ship's rail.

    to remind his officers to keep the boys from "skylarking"—goofing off. His journal tells of keen-eyed boys who were "posted aloft" to look for land. Once he described a group of boys clustered at the rail of the Santa María, laughing and throwing stones from the cooking box at some seabirds near the ship.

    after three weeks at sea with no sight of land, sailors began to panic. In the fourth week, a group of crew members threatened to throw Columbus overboard if he didn't turn back. But three days later a sailor high atop the mast of the Pinta cried out, "¡Tierra!" He had spotted land. Just as Columbus had said, about a month had passed by. Surely they had reached Cipango.

    three ships as gromets rowed Columbus and his officers toward the beach of a green, low-lying island. Columbus splashed ashore and jammed a pole bearing Spain's flag into the sand, claiming the land in the name of the Spanish king and queen. A group of about thirty naked, painted people watched cautiously from a distance before edging out slowly to inspect—and then greet—the Spaniards.

    Cuba, and an island they called Hispaniola—now the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Columbus wrote that the boys discovered pine trees and other new plants, and that one of them found "certain stones that appear to contain gold."

    after three days on shore. He instructed the pilot to steer the boat toward a goldfield the "Indians" (as he had decided to call the people who lived on the islands) had told him about and then stumbled, exhausted, into his cabin. But the pilot was tired, too. He spotted a boy sleeping on deck, shook him awake, and ordered him to take over the ship. That boy may have been Diego Bermúdez, for he was one of the few young boys on the Santa María's crew, but Columbus's journal doesn't name him. Then the pilot, too, fell asleep.

    boys were strictly forbidden from taking the wheel of any of the ships. Columbus's log tells what happened next:

    the bank so quietly that it was hardly noticeable. When the boy felt the rudder ground and felt the noise of the sea, he cried out. I jumped up instantly; no one else had yet felt that we were aground. Then the master of the ship, Juan de la Cosa, who was on watch, came out. I ordered him to rouse the crew."

    only choice was to tear apart the Santa María and build a fort with the timbers. They called it La Navidad, meaning Christmas. One boy's bad luck had turned into the first Spanish settlement in North America.

What Happened to Diego Bermúdez?

    New World on any of Columbus's other three voyages, but his brother Juan did. In 1515 Juan stopped to explore a group of islands and left behind a few pigs. Later, when British explorers found the islands, they were overrun with the pigs' wild descendants. The Bermuda Islands are named after Diego's brother Juan.

"When you ask for something, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with

"All those that I saw were young people, none of whom was over thirty years old," wrote Christopher Columbus, describing the first group of people he met in the New World. Indeed, anthropologists conclude that at least half of all Tainos were fifteen or younger.

    dawn and scooped breakfast from a big day pot, still warm from last night's meal. It was usually leftover "pepper pot" stew, made with the bitter juice of a tall, leafy plant called manioc. After breakfast, girls would go off to help their aunts, cousins, and mothers tend manioc in fields and take care of young children. They peeled and sliced sweet potatoes and rolled manioc into flour to make cassava bread. Girls helped their mothers plant maize, scratching holes into the earth with a pointed stick. Girls also took fiber from cotton and wound it into cords to make hammocks.

    men. They lowered nets from boats into the ocean, and then hauled in the catch. Sometimes they speared larger fish with bone-tipped harpoons. Tainos made huge canoes by hollowing out the trunks of trees. Some were so large they could hold fifty rowers. When everyone stroked together in rhythm, Taino canoes were faster than Spanish ships.

    with small yellow dogs called alcos that couldn't bark and are now extinct. Boys and girls chased down lizards, iguanas, snakes, and birds. They shinnied up trees and caught wild parrots by luring them with tame parrots tied to their hands. They snacked throughout the day, grabbing handfuls of sea grapes and coco plums, snatching birds' eggs from nests, and peeling snails from rocks. Boys and girls practiced a ball game called batey—a cross between volleyball and soccer played with a rubber ball. Players sent the ball back and forth through the air, using all parts of their body but their hands. Teams from villages often competed with one another.

    who became even more important to him than his father. Taino children grew up to worship two supreme gods, one male and one female. They believed that after a person died, his or her soul would enter a paradise called coyaba, where there would be no more hurricanes or hunger or sickness and there would always be plenty of water to drink.

    Tainos as "people poor in everything." He assumed they would happily believe anything the explorers told them. The Spanish were keenly interested in the small pieces of gold that dangled from Taino ears and nostrils—which, the explorers thought, proved that they had actually reached Japan. The Tainos, fearful of the Spaniards' weapons, were eager to please. The Tainos kept saying yes, there was more gold. And there was, but not much. There were no palaces with golden roofs, just nuggets that had washed down to the bottoms of mountain streams in Hispaniola over many years.

    who paddled their canoe up alongside the Niña, perhaps to show off their parrots or trade for trinkets. Columbus wrote that he intended to take them to Spain to learn Spanish and then bring them back to help priests convert Indians to Christianity. A week later the two oldest squirmed free and dived overboard. A furious Columbus watched them splash away.